Yahoo Lifestyle Brooke Shields Reveals the Past TV Role That ‘If I Could Do It Again, I’d Do It Tomorrow’
Save for a 1992 guest spot on the OG Quantum Leap and voicing herself in a 1993 episode of The Simpsons, Brooke Shields — best known at the time for the ’80s films The Blue Lagoon and Endless Love, plus Calvin Klein ads — had yet to break out on television through the mid-1990s.
And then she winningly stalked Joey Tribbiani (more accurately, Dr. Drake Ramoray) in Friends‘ January 1996 post-Super Bowl episode.
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“Friends changed my entire career,” Shields avowed during a Monday-night Q&A with SHE Media CEO Samantha Skey, hosted by sister site Flow Space in PMC’s New York City studio.
In fact, not eight months later, Shields was headlining her own NBC sitcom, Suddenly Susan, where she played a suddenly single copy editor at a fictional San Francisco magazine.
“Suddenly Susan was just a revelation to me. It was a very special, special, special show,” Shields shared. Alas, amid multiple showrunner changes (and a soft Season 4 reboot), “We never were as good as we could be,” the actress lamented.
When TVLine asked Shields which of her TV roles she wishes she could have played longer, Susan first came to mind — but so did the sadness of co-star David Strickland’s death at age 29, midway through Season 3. Strickland’s character, music reporter Todd, in turn died in the Season 3 finale. The sitcom then underwent the aforementioned reboot, changing the magazine, workplace location and much of the cast.
Shields said it was difficult to continue on without Strickland in Susan‘s retooled fourth and final season, nor would she have wanted to do more under that circumstance. As such, the TV role she’d most love to revisit is movie producer Wendy on NBC’s Sex and the City-like Lipstick Jungle, which premiered in February 2008, co-starred Kim Raver and Lindsay Price, and ran for two seasons.
“Lipstick Jungle was everything that I needed it to be,” Shields effused. “It was such a great period, but we unfortunately got sort of screwed” by multiple time slot changes and the early limitations of ratings capturing DVR playback.
“It was one of those things where it had nothing to do with the chemistry of the show,” Shields notes. “It was shot in New York — it was really a New York show — and my character was funny as well as dramatic. So Lipstick Jungle, if I could go and do it again, I would do it tomorrow.”
Shields is out promoting her new memoir, Brooke Shields Is Not Allowed to Get Old: Thoughts on Aging as a Woman, out now.
‘Brooke Shields Is Not Allowed to Get Old: Thoughts on Aging as a Woman’
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